The Great Airbrushing meets the Great Relearning on the Fourth

posted at 7:30 pm on July 4, 2010 by Ed Driscoll

Like many states with large urban areas, California has a bit of a graffiti problem. Drive past a railroad yard, an industrial park, a bridge or an overpass, and the odds are very good that you’ll the spray-painted markings from a would-be artist’s latest quest for immortality. And given the slow rate that this stuff seems to get cleaned up, if ever, he may have stumbled over the perfect medium to achieve it.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is apologizing for a decision by state transportation officials to paint over a giant American flag mural on the side of a Northern California freeway.The 35-foot long flag was painted on a concrete slab near Interstate 680 in Sunol by three men about two weeks after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Even though the mural had been in clear view of commuters for nearly nine years, a Caltrans spokesman says it wasn’t until last month that someone in the agency asked if the flag was on state property.

Spokesman Allyn Amsk says it was covered up with grey paint Wednesday morning.

In a statement Friday, Schwarzenegger extended his “apologies to the artists whose mural inspired drivers along 680 for over eight and a half years.”

The congressman is not referring to the grand plans of statesmen and social engineers, or the yardsticks of social progress that so enamor the left. Boehner was referring to a state of mind about America that is disappearing.What else is America except a place that has lived in the dreams of men since we organized ourselves into nation-states? Each of us alone defines our own America, imbuing it with our own hopes, animating it with our own definitions of liberty, consecrating it by our embrace of its traditions and values. It is this feeling about America that Boehner believes is threatened. But is he right? Is his implication that the growth of government under the current administration — the largest expansion in history — can destroy what we “grew up with” as a vision of America in our minds?

There are other things we grew up with in America — those of us of Boehner’s age and a little younger — and not all of them bring pleasant memories to the surface. In fact, a significant number of them we wanted “snuffed out.” Certainly, the casual kind of racism and intolerance that was not unfamiliar in the America of my own youth should have been snuffed out. The second-class citizenship accorded women (cemented in both tradition and the law) needed to be left behind, as did attitudes toward gays, the handicapped, the mentally ill, and others in society who lived on the margins, largely invisible to the majority of us, and who suffered in silence until their concerns were given voice a decade or two later.

The top down airbrushing out of American exceptionalism, in the both the figurative sense as Boehner noted, and in the literal sense via California’s draconian state government is a big part of why John Podhoretz and Roger L. Simon are also striking similar themes this weekend. First up, responding to today’s equivalent of “the casual kind of racism and intolerance” mandated, then and now by the state, Roger wishes the nation “Happy Unbirthday, America:”

But whatever we call our situation, the causes of our malaise are all too apparent — a depressed economy, out-of-control government spending with the largest deficits since World War II, an intractable ecological disaster with no plan how to end it, a continuing global war against an enemy we dare not even name, a mad theocracy on the verge of nuclear weapons, and so on.

Worst of all, however, may be the growing cancer inside our own house. Difficult as our problems may be, they can be resolved democratically in a society under the rule of law. But we have reason to believe that these days, that most basic of all our legal principles, that keystone of our system, one which was fought for by generations of Americans, equality before the law, is under attack at the center of our government.

That is why the most important story that Pajamas Media has covered since its inception in 2005 may be the emergence of whistleblower J. Christian Adams from the Department of Justice. Adams was an attorney in the voting rights division who resigned when the Department forbid him to testify on the New Black Panther case before the US Commission on Civil Rights. The Department had dismissed that case before sentencing, even though they had won it. According to Adams, the DOJ has a dreadful record when pursuing examples of black on white racism. Only racism towards people of color is countenanced.

As CEO of Pajamas Media, I am proud to have published Adams and will continue to do so. I am also a former sixties civil rights worker and what we were fighting for at the time was true racial equality, not an unbalanced system in which aggrieved interest groups, whatever their historical justification, can threaten and bully people of other races. I can’t say what Dr. King would think today (unlike others, I am not psychic) but I would like to think he would oppose racism from all quarters and toward all races. In fact, I am almost certain he would.

At the New York Post, Podhoretz asks, “How are those of us who stand in opposition to the domestic agenda and foreign-policy views of President Obama and his administration to think about this country in 2010 as we approach the nation’s birthday on Sunday?”

Or, to put it another way: How should a self-described patriot think, act and talk about the United States if that self-described patriot believes the elected leadership of the United States has led the country into a ditch that threatens to expand into a bottomless chasm?

Does the fault lie with the president and his party, or does it reside in the electorate that installed them? If it resides in the electorate, what does that say about the condition of the United States?

People interested in public policy and politics with a philosophical bent are profoundly attracted to these sorts of questions. They seem to cut through the fog of specifics to the clarity provided by an inquiry into the basics, into first things.

(After all, it gets tedious after a while to say, “This detail is what’s wrong with the Obama approach to health care,” or “That consequence indicts the entirety of the Bush approach in the War on Terror.” Arguments conducted on that level invite endless counterarguments and rebuttals. Worse, they elevate the opposition as worthy of engagement — when a ferocious and passionate partisan seeks to discredit the opposition. To delegitimize the opposition.)

In the case of Barack Obama, the root questions are: Who is he and why is he doing this?

Podhoretz’s article is titled,“Patriotic opposition: Loving a nation that elected O.” And while it ends on a hopeful note (help is coming in November), reading it after eight years of a culture war from the left against President Bush, followed by two years of a culture war from left against the Americans involved in the Tea Party, it’s a reminder that the Culture War itself, with roots dating back to the 1950s and earlier, has reached the quagmire stage. You can see it at work in Hollywood, where seemingly everyrecentproduct is trashed by some protest group as “racist,” when employees of a General Electric co-owned television network can refer to half their potential audience as racist, and when the journalists writing at an email list started by an employee of the Washington Post can refer to their former editor, today the publisher of one of the left’s flagship house organs as — you guessed it — racist.

Taken as a whole, what do all those charges say about the nation’s critics? As Victor Davis Hanson wrote last year:

The charge of racism has been leveled against critics of President Obama’s health-care reform by everyone from New York Times columnists, racial activists, and Democratic legislators to senior statesmen like Jimmy Carter (“It’s a racist attitude”), Bill Clinton (“some . . . are racially prejudiced”), and Walter Mondale (“I don’t want to pick a person [and] say, ‘He’s a racist,’ but I do think the way they’re piling on Obama . . . I think I see an edge in them that’s a little bit different”).

But are Obama’s critics really racists?

It is a serious charge. If true, it means the hope of a color-blind society is essentially over after a half-century of civil-rights progress. If false, it means that we have institutionalized vicious smears as legitimate political tactics — and, in the process, discredited the entire dialogue that surrounds racial prejudice.

A couple of decades ago, in a piece that was later republished in his Hooking Up anthology from 2000, Tom Wolfe described the twin polarities of the modern left: “Starting From Zero” and the inevitable “Great Relearning” that inevitably follows — typically slowly and painfully — when a nation decides to discard its cultural past:

“Start from zero” was the slogan of the Bauhaus School, a tiny artists’ movement in Germany in the 1920s that swept aside the architectural styles of the past and created the glass-box face of the modern American city during the twentieth century. I should mention the soaring exuberance with which the movement began, the passionate conviction of the Bauhaus’s leader, Walter Gropius, that by starting from zero in architecture and design man could free himself from the dead hand of the past.The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes of restraints of the past and start out from zero. Among the codes and restraints that people in the [hippie] communes swept aside—quite purposely—were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all.

And in 1968 they were relearning…the laws of hygiene…by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. This process, namely the relearning—following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero—seems to me to be the leitmotif of the 21st century.

In politics the 20th century’s great start from zero was one-party socialism, also known as Communism or Marxism-Leninism. Given that system’s bad reputation in the West today, it is instructive to read John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World—before turning to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Well before the sudden breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the relearning had reached the point where even ruling circles in the Soviet Union and China had begun to wonder how best to conquer Communism into something other than, in Bernard Henri-Levy’s memorable phrase, “barbarians with a human face.”

The great American contribution to the 20th century’s start from zero was in the area of manners and mores, especially in what was rather primly called “the sexual revolution.” In every hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible belt, may be found the village brothel, no longer hidden in a house of blue lights or red lights or behind a green door but openly advertised by the side of the road with a thousand-watt backlit plastic sign. But in the sexual revolution, too, a painful dawn broke in the 1980s, and the relearning, in the form of prophylaxis, began. All may be summed up in a single term requiring no amplifications: AIDS.

The Great Relearning—if anything so prosaic as remedial education can be called great—should be thought of not so much as the end point of the 20th century as the theme of the 21st. There is no law in history that says a new century must start 10 or 20 years beforehand, but two times in a row it has worked out that way.

In a way, America has inverted the process: we didn’t have a “Start From Zero” revolution in the 20th century, nor in January of 2009; it was a slow, inexorable process on the left in academia and both the entertainment and journalism to snuff out of what made America great. It ultimately produced men like Barack Obama who seemingly display little or no pride in what makes this nation unique, despite its flaws, both real and punitively imagined. But perhaps the fortunate lack of a sudden “Start From Zero” moment means that the Great Relearning could occur faster than most.

Or as Podhoretz adds:

The American political system presents two choices to the American people — Republicans or Democrats. After preferring Republicans for a few election cycles in the early years of the first decade of this century and not liking the result, the electorate decided to go for Democrats for a few election cycles. It now appears they don’t like this result either — and will now go back to the Republicans and give them another chance.

The body politic is not panicking, even though the news is dire — because it knows, somehow, that this too shall pass. America has faced worse times and weathered them. Even within our memory, it has had other leaders who also misunderstood their mandates and offered solutions to the nation’s problems that only exacerbated them.

The body politic learns from its mistakes and uses its power to correct them. Taken as a whole, this bunch of rubes and dupes and boobs shows a remarkably commonsensical approach to these things by saying, in essence:

Nothing is irreversible. Change is possible.

The political message of July 4, 2010 that is looking increasingly like a harbinger of doom for the man who popularized it two years ago is simply this:

Absolutely idiotic and no excuse for painting over the flag mural but for the fact that who ever ordered it is a leftard democrat.

I have to look at all this Azlan mural crap. They would never even think about covering up that. Then there was the time they let some “street artists” paint a mural on a building which had gang & murder references and symbols all over it. Just idiots.

And that’s why I make sure I pay the minimum of taxes, refuse to pass any ballot measure to increase taxes or pass bonds for anything, and would never donate a dime to any local, county, or state government.

And if it was the Obama Logo painted on that highway;
They would have airlifted the concrete to a specialized laboratory where experts from around the world would have be flown in to correct any weathering that was done and determine a proper treatment to the surface to prevent any more deterioration.

JPod seems to be caught up in wistful thinking. I’d like for him to ask can the majority of voters overcome the Dem/Chicago machine?

Can voters survive the huge pressure that the media will bring against R’s…ie will they hold fast, or in the final analysis say, well, maybe R’s are racist, reactionaries. I’m confused, I think I’ll stay home.

Sure sounds like we a few too many folks working for the government with time on their hands.
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Wonder if they could do such harm with 1/10th the workforce? For that matter, what’s the definition of success / ROI for all government employees considering they are all below-the-line costs? Wouldn’t we recover more quickly if we told these people to go to work for profit-making companies – moved them from dead-weight burden to the productive side of the equation. They might even continue to do the same work, but in a “for profit, competitive” environment the dynamics change from burden to benefit.
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Wonder when we’ll reach the tipping point? Where the people say “enough, get out of our face, and out of our life.” I suspect the only reason we’ve tolerated government growing more intrusive this far is it seemed to be an increasingly unimportant part of our lives (because we were all growing so much more wealthy either in absolute dollars or what the same money buys today v. a decade ago).

Faster than you can say ‘oil spill’, this unsightly blemish, visual pollution, this ‘graffiti’ was removed.
Obama et al, get your nose out of my business, you fingers out of my pocket, and I’ll keep my boot out of your heinie!

The body politic learns from its mistakes and uses its power to correct them. Taken as a whole, this bunch of rubes and dupes and boobs shows a remarkably commonsensical approach to these things by saying, in essence:

Nothing is irreversible. Change is possible.

The political message of July 4, 2010 that is looking increasingly like a harbinger of doom for the man who popularized it two years ago is simply this:

Yes, we can.

Mr. Podhoretz is right and optimistic. However, if said “rubes, dupes and boobs” will be fooled, again, by the same charlatan, then they deserve full demise.

That is a wonderfully inspirational video that I have forwarded to others. Thanks.

The destruction and defacing or obliteration of our national symbols of pride and national identity are so similar to what Islamists have done as they have stretched their tentacles. They pull down statues that have stood for centuries and cover over art and other symbols of Judeo-Christian heritage in a denial of history. Bastages all!

The reference to the Bahaus architecture that sprung up in the ’20’s reminds me of a wonderful novel that I recently read: The Glass Room.

The story begins in post-WWI Czecho-Slovakia, where a Jewish industrialist (a forward-thinking automobile manufacturer) builds a marvelously modern home on his in-laws property. It serves as a salon for the cultured intelligencia of his time.

However, with time as the family is forced to flee, first to Switzerland and eventually to America, the house is seized by Nazis, who use the home for “scientific” studies to determine physical attributes of a perfect race and later by the Communists for their new “cultural” revolution. The story is enveloped at the beginning and end by the visit of the now-blind widow of the industrialist, invited to “see” her former home, which is now a heritage site.

The novel is richly rewarding in tracing how a culture can change for the worst when little resistance is given to destructive forces.

Apologies for the OT book report, but I really enjoyed the novel and its parallels to what is happening to us now.

“The body politic is not panicking, even though the news is dire — because it knows, somehow, that this too shall pass. America has faced worse times and weathered them. Even within our memory, it has had other leaders who also misunderstood their mandates and offered solutions to the nation’s problems that only exacerbated them.

The body politic learns from its mistakes and uses its power to correct them. Taken as a whole, this bunch of rubes and dupes and boobs shows a remarkably commonsensical approach to these things by saying, in essence:

Nothing is irreversible. Change is possible.”

I hate to disagree here. But this is simply not true. There are many historical examples of irreversible changes.

If it were not so, let’s all book a flight to Italy to visit the still functioning Roman Empire. Or talk about the great British Empire that still controls the seas… Oh yeah. Gone.

No, let’s not sugar coat the situation. We’ve been sliding downhill for a long time. Obama has just added more slick mud under us and more rocks in the back of the truck.

I’m not too upset about the mural because I never could fully get behind graffiti. You can’t deny the fact that, even at its best, it’s still vandalism. Even though there are beautiful examples that demonstrate enormous talent, I never embraced it as an art form. If I were Arnold I would try to get the city to locate the original artist and hire him to re-do it. Of course I’d have to pay for it out of my Terminator money because the state is broke, but it would make for a Hollywood ending.

They didn’t intend it this way of course, but the brain-dead bureaucrats that inhabit Sacramento have created the perfect metaphor for this Fourth of July weekend, which certainly feels a bit gloomier than some.

Ed, I’ve always been on the fence about you and AP, yeah you’re good guys and all, but…

This is BS. They knew exactly what they were doing. Some Govt. employee probably called them up and told them it was an American flag and they were told to cover it up anyway.

Leftists are NOT our friends. Leftists CANNOT be friends of America as it was founded. Leftists look to destroy and subvert for personal power.

Never trust a democrat ever, they may seem Nice but in their heart of hearts they seek tyranny, they seek power. Nothing good has ever came from democrats and stateism/socialism/leftism. You’re a smart guy Ed, don’t let them fool you!

Is there any way we can lop off part of California and just give it to Mexico. There are so many liberals, in California, that just don’t want to be part of the United States. They want to have sanctuary cities, they don’t want to make a home for the USS Iowa, their cities want to close recruiting offices, they think is OK to name sewage treatment facilities after a sitting president they don’t agree with, they’re just dispicable people. They want Mexifornia so just let them have a section and see what happens when they pull the same stunts.

The people painting over this flag knew what they were doing. The people who ordered it done, knew what they were doing. If they hate this country so much, let’s help them be a part of whatever it is they could possibly want to be a part of.

Stupidity is now a craze. I get the feeling that more and more people are joining the ranks of the stupid because they feel left out. They feel ashamed to assert common sense because it’s not fashionable.

Sometimes, when I’m a little drunk, as I am now as I sit on the bus, an insignificant little thing will appear to symbolize this general stupidity, this I-don’t-know-what which makes me feel such contempt for the general what-have-you. This young guy got on the bus. He has that godawful haircut that so many young guys have these days: shoulder length with a side parting that sweeps diagonally over the eyes. Approximately every 2 seconds his hair will fall over his eyes and so he will either tip his head, or flick it, or brush it aside with his hand, or blow it out of the way. It falls right back over his eyes immediately. The kid must do this constantly all day, every waking moment.

And I see this shallow, bubble headed stupidity and I can’t help thinking “this kid voted for Obama, he buys into AGW, he thinks capitalism is evil, his brain lights up on cue when he hears the word ‘diversity,’ he thinks coal plants should be replaced by windmills, he wishes America were Europe” and so on.

I know I’m not making much sense here, I never do when I’m drunk, but I know what I mean dammit.

In a way, America has inverted the process: we didn’t have a “Start From Zero” revolution in the 20th century, nor in January of 2009; it was a slow, inexorable process on the left in academia and both the entertainment and journalism to snuff out of what made America great. It ultimately produced men like Barack Obama who seemingly display little or no pride in what makes this nation unique, despite its flaws, both real and punitively imagined. But perhaps the fortunate lack of a sudden “Start From Zero” moment means that the Great Relearning could occur faster than most.

On the whole, I think this country has a snooze alarm that periodically sets off a Great Relearning about every other generation. It goes off, we answer it by relearning, then we go back to sleep — and lapse into another Restart From Zero. And then something makes the snooze alarm go off again. (Those of you who aren’t afraid of that Bible thing, cf. the cycles of decline/deliverance in the Book of Judges.)

Yet another reason why I seriously wish California would just secede from the rest of the country and become an independent sovereign nation filled with moronic politicians and greying old foggy left wing activists from the 60’s.

If anything, at that point, we could declare Pelosi, Waxman, Stark, Boxer, and Feinstein illegals and deport them!

This is the blackest July 4th I can remember in my lifetime. We are celebrating our past greatness…and cringing in fear of our future.

AUINSC on July 4, 2010 at 8:16 PM

You know…I just saw Toy Story 3, noticed the theme of looking to the future, and thought “from the time TS2 was in the theaters to the time this movie came out, my hopes & dreams for the future went from near-unlimited to practically nil.”

Soon it may be that our entire nation will be like Egypt; all we can do is reminisce about our glory days as an empire and recite the glorious deeds of our forefathers.